YouTube meanies played a cruel trick on people stupid enough to upgrade their iPhone 7s by telling them a "secret hack" to get a headphone jack which involved drilling into the phone.

Working on the basis that people who thought buying the iPhone 7s were rather dim, TechRax knocked together a video showing users how they could install a headphone jack in their new phone and not need expensive and ineffective wireless headphones.

The video shows a “secret hack” which involves drilling into a phone to install the headphone jack, and while most people would see the humour in this, the sort of people who buy an iPhone 7 are exactly the sort that might actually think it is for real.

The Tame Apple Press is furious with TechRax for being responsible for a number of people actually drilling holes into their iPhone 7 handsets. The YouTube video has amassed over 7.5 million views since being posted online last week, with it attracting 81,000 dislikes in the process.

The dislikes come from those who think that the whole thing is a grave insult to the Apple religion. We thought the comment from one Apple fanboy that “while there are starving children in Africa you have ruined a piece of technology” was particularly strange. If you are so worried about starving children in Africa why did you waste your money buying an expensive phone which is not much different from last year’s model?

What is a little more worrying though was how many people who tried the “hack” out for themselves and found it did not work.

“I was halfway through drilling and I realised you were messing with me. What do I do know?”

“I don’t think I was using the right sized drill bit, can you tell me which one I should have been using.”

“I ended up with a display malfunction, these instructions are not good enough to follow safely.”

Yeah we don’t know how many of the complaints are real, because we don’t believe that people could be that stupid. However they did actually buy an iPhone 7 so you can’t be too sure about that.There are warnings in the Tame Apple press about it too.

Vevo might be the new MTV for millennials, who might not know MTV that played music a few decades ago. Vevo CEO Erik Huggers had an interview at a Hunter Walk blog talking about YouTube, subscription base and the future.

Vevo CEO, ex Intel and ex BBC executive Erik Huggers mentioned that the Vevo will get a subscription based service but for the time being the company will stay with add supported content. Huggers first worked first on the iBBC player and later at Intel OnCue, then Verizon before getting the Vevo CEO.

The company has announced a new Apple TV, iOS and Android applications for people who like to watch the content on the TV console or their tablets and phones. Huggers mentioned that Vevo was getting 17 billion unique views per month. He said that if you are musician you will prefer Spotify for audio streaming and Vevo to YouTube, and here is why.

Peter Mensch, the manager of bands including Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Muse told a BBC Radio 4 documentary on the music business:

"YouTube, they're the devil. We don't get paid at all."

The BBC quoted him saying that YouTube was killing the record industry.

There is now way you can say it better than this, Mensch obviously knows what he is talking about. When we dug a bit deeper into the issue, bands have issues with complete albums being uploaded to YouTube. The big bands don’t get paid at all, at least according to Peter Mensch.

Vevo might turn its back to YouTube, despite its current business model where the company uses YouTube to distribute its videos. We see a big change coming. Artists are obviously not happy as people are ripping their stuff and not paying.

Online publishing was an area where big mistakes were made 20 + years ago. Online magazines usually rely on marketing, same as YouTube, but it seems that YouTube, Facebook and other big social based website make a lot of money and giving YouTubers and artists pennies.

Huggers believes Vevo can offer a tailored experience which is personalised for individuals who love music videos via various channels including Apple TV or mobile applications. Imagine if Vevo starts offering exclusive concert footage of your favourite bands, this would probably be worth of a few bucks a month, wouldn't it?

Experts at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in California have recently begun talks with camera manufacturers to get 360-degree live streaming video on YouTube, the world’s most popular video content service.

Multiple sources familiar with the plans have said the company could be helping to develop specifications with camera manufacturers to support 360-degree live streaming as they currently do for regular cameras. The launch timeframe for the service is currently unknown, and the company has currently declined to comment.

Back in March 2015, the company announced support for uploading 360-degree videos from the whopping three cameras that are compatible with its service. They include the Kodak SP360 4K camera, the Ricoh Theta and the IC Real Tech Allie. The devices record footage through multiple wide-angle lenses. Post-processing software is then used to stitch footage from each individual camera together to achieve the final spherical views. To enable live streaming of 360-degree video, it is expected that YouTube will have developed a specification that enables video stitching to be processed in real-time.

Kodak's first 4K 360-degree video camera, the PixPro SP360

With this in mind, it would make sense for the company to limit its support to just a few cameras on the market, as tens or hundreds of 360-degree live camera configurations could prove a very difficult task for developing a unified specification to accommodate live stitching. To work around these complexities, YouTube could have live stitching performed on the actual cameras themselves with initial support for just a few devices, including those mentioned above.

Currently, the service supports 360-degree videos at 24fps, 25fps, 30fps, 48fps, 50fps and 60fps. There is also a metadata requirement for 360-degree playback to be enabled, and YouTube has created a “360 Video Metadata” app for Windows and Mac that will do this for you automatically. Metadata can also be added manually using a “Spatial Media Metadata Injector” Python 2.7 script.

Interestingly, the company also recommends uploading 360-degree stitched videos in 4K (3840x2160p) resolution.

Computer gaming outfit Nintendo, whose toilet themed games consoles are flushing down the loo have thought it a natty idea to try and screw cash out of you-tube reviewers.

While some games companies are desperate for publicity, Nintendo is taking a dim view of reviewers who play the game and then post reviews and clips on YouTube.

It argues that since they make money, it should have a slice of the pie – in fact more than 40 per cent of it.."Let's Plays," and they're some of the most popular gaming-related videos on the internet and are seen as a major advert for Nintendo games.

We are not talking much dosh here a 1,000 views on a single video will generate around five dollars of ad revenue. Half of that goes to Google, and the rest goes to the creator.

Some reviewers who have millions of views, can make full-time income from sharing their hobbies with their fans.

Copyright claim

In 2013, Nintendo attempted to make sweeping copyright claims on videos on YouTube that included footage from their games. It demanded all the money that Lets Play creators made. Instead. It caused a significant backlash in the Let's Play community. Eventually, Nintendo dropped the claims.

However now the company's new initiative, unveiled in January, proposes to share the revenue for some videos.

YouTubers can apply to the Nintendo Creators Program and if an approved channel's video contains footage from a list of approved games, the revenue is split between the two parties – 40 per cent for Nintendo and 60 per cent for the creator.

If Nintendo chooses not to approve a video, then it can claim 100 per cent of the ad revenue, as it attempted to do in 2013. So far, it's not clear why some videos are approved and some are not. Cynics suggest that if you say something bad about a game then you could get it refused and all your add content goes to Google.

Since Google already claims 50 per cent of the total ad revenue generated by videos, the creator and Nintendo's share would be divvied up from the remaining 50 per cent.

Stuffing up your own business

To make matters worse Nintendo was flooded with applications. While they promised wait times of three business days for a reply, instead it turned into weeks without notice.

As a result the video makers are posting their content illegally or have given up. With business sense like that it is no wonder Nintendo is not doing as well as it used to.

Last night was marked by one of the biggest sports events in the world and for people outside the US that probably weren't even aware that it's going on, it is called Super Bowl 2015.

This is a top sporting event where finalist of the American football NFL league meet head to head and it's huge. The price of commercials aired during the event went up to 4.5 million USD for a 30 second clip, but you are quite sure that hundreds of millions of people in the US will watch it.

Hollywood movie companies used this event to air a few trailers for their upcoming 2015 movies. One of the hot movies from Universal Pictures was Fast & Furious: Supercharged, another sequel in the never ending car chase franchise Fast and Furious.

These guys aired the official trailer in 1080p or Full HD, not 4K. Terminator Genesis is an upcoming movie from Paramount studios, again aired in 1080p on YouTube. There is no 4K 3840x2160 version on the official YouTube channel.

Walt Disney Studios showed a nice rendered animated movie starring George Clooney called Tomorrowland, again at 1080p no 4K 3840x2160 on the off official Walt Disney Studios YouTube channel.

Since YouTube has been offering 4K uploads and streaming for at least 13 months now, you would expect that Hollywood top names and studios would release 4K, 2160p trailers. They spent $4.5 million to air these 30-second clips and then forgot to upload the 4K version for the general public on YouTube.

Sometimes we wonder about the people in these companies, namely in the marketing hot seats, who do know a bit about technology. Guess what, millions of people already have a 4K capable TVs and hundreds of thousands can watch it on their computers.

Google has informed the world that as of yesterday, the default player on its YouTube service is HTML5.

Until yesterday Adobe Flash was the plugin of choice, but not anymore. HTML5 is a core technology markup language that was used by YouTube for more than five years under a beta program and now it made it as the default in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox. The reason why it took so long to get HTML 5 on YouTube as default choice was the lack of Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets YouTube show more videos with less buffering.

Google found a way to bridge this gap and fix the lack of ABR with web browser vendors. Google also points out that the HTML5 has a few advantages. MediaSource Extensions and its main part Adaptive Bitrate are probably the most important. According to Google, YouTube ABR has reduced buffering by more than 50 percent globally and as much as 80 percent on heavily-congested networks. MediaSource Extensions also enable live streaming in gaming consoles like Xbox and PS4, on devices like Chromecast and in web browsers.

HTML5 lets you use the VP9 codec. This Google supported codec will give you higher quality video with an average bandwidth reduction of 35 percent. This will be important for 4K and HD video file users at 60FPS that will start their videos 18 to 50 percent faster. With 4K being the dominant video format of the future, this is an important step for YouTube.

Google points out that encryption got better with Encrypted Media Extensions and Common Encryption of HTML5, as well as WebRTC that enables everyone to share their videos easier. HTML5 also means that YouTube moves to <iframe> embeds away from old style <object> embeds.

HTML5 brings a new fullscreen API and it provides an immersive fullscreen viewing experience (perfect for those 4K videos), all with standard HTML UI.

Search outfit Yahoo is thinking of starting up its own rival to YouTube. Word on the street is that Yahoo is trying to headhunt YouTube’s most popular stars and networks to show their stuff on its site.

Yahoo hopes to take advantage complaints by both video creators and owners, who think that they don’t make enough money on YouTube. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer tried and failed to buy France’s DailyMotion and has been pushing a number of other high-profile media initiatives.

The company has recently been approaching individual YouTube stars and some of the big networks now on the giant online video service. Yahoo executives are telling video makers and owners that the company can offer them better economics than they’re getting on YouTube, either by improving the ad revenue or by offering guaranteed ad rates for their videos.

In addition, Yahoo has offered extensive marketing, even on its home page, as well as allowing video producers the ability to sell advertising along with Yahoo’s sales force. Yahoo does not want the rubbish though. It is cherry-picking particularly popular, more professional YouTube videos.

YouTube is changing the way uploaders manage comments on their videos.

A new system, which began rolling out to a limited number of uploaders on Tuesday, favours relevancy over recency and introduces better moderation tools. The new commenting system, which is powered by Google+ will show YouTube viewers the most relevant comments first, such as those by the video uploader or channel owner.

If a person is flagged for spam or abuse, don't be surprised to find your comments buried, and celebrities who have strong Google+ reputations will be boosted above others. Comments made on posts with YouTube links in the Google social network will show up on YouTube itself. So, you'll see comments from people in your Google+ Circles higher up, too.

The Upload Studio for Xbox One will only support video sharing over Xbox Live at launch. This comes as quite a blow to Xbox One buyers who expected YouTube and Facebook support out of the box.

Word is now that Microsoft is planning to add both YouTube and Facebook support at some point next year. In the meantime the last 30 seconds of game play captured by the Xbox One will only be shareable over the Xbox Live service.

As to when exactly Microsoft is planning to update the system to offer this support by a patch is unknown. It is slated for some point in 2014, but that is all we know at this time.

As expected, Asus has announced its innovative Qube Google TV device that already showed up in a bunch of leaks and an FCC filing.

Unfortunately, Asus will not host a press event for the Qube at CES 2013, but the company has released a brief press release taunting Qube's unique "Qube interface" which apparently displays functions by rotating on-screen cube shape, like we did not see that coming. This, of course, has not stopped those that were curious enough, so Anandtech managed to score a hands-on as well as some details and specs. The Marvell Armada 1500 platform is the heart of the Qube, two HDMI ports are on board, as well as Ethernet, WiFi and USB ports. It also features a full QWERTY remote with microphone for voice commands and gyro for motion control.

Qube will offer both motion control and voice search that integrates Google Play, Chrome, Youtube in one compact device as well as access to Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.

The advanced remote control supports motion sensing for gaming and other applications, while it will also be possible to control the Qube with the Mobile Remote app available for Android smartphones.

Asus will also throw in an extra 50GB of WebStorage cloud space with every Qube. All we need now is the official price and release date. Anandtech noted that the Qube could end up somewhere in the US $100-120 price range.